This disclosure relates generally to presenting content to users of an online system, and more specifically to recommending actions for a user to perform based on actions by users logged by the online system.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Online systems allow users to easily communicate and to share content with other online system users by providing content to an online system for presentation to other users. Content provided to an online system by a user may be declarative information provided by a user, status updates, check-ins to locations, images, photographs, videos, text data, or any other information a user wishes to share with additional users of the online system. An online system may also generate content for presentation to a user, such as content describing actions taken by other users on the online system.
Additionally, many online systems may recommend actions to their users to encourage or to increase user interaction with the online systems. For example, if a publishing user provides content to an online system for presentation to other users, the online system may recommend one or more actions to the publishing user to increase a number of users to whom the content is presented or to increase likelihoods of users viewing the content. Many online systems recommend actions to users based on actions performed by other users and logged by an online system, such as actions performed by users after being presented with one or more recommended actions. Based on the logged actions by other users, the online system recommends an action to the publishing user.
However, many online systems have large numbers of users performing large numbers of actions and present large number of recommended actions. Because of the large number of actions and amount of content presented, logged actions and information describing content presentation are sampled by an online system, with the sampled data used to recommend actions to a user. However, different actions or presentations of content generate different amounts of information logged by an online system, so sampling different actions or presentations of content at a common sampling rate may fail to sufficiently reduce the amount of information accessed by the online system for certain actions or presented content while overly reducing the amount of information accessed by the online system for other actions or other presented content.